Dakar, Senegal – July 6, 2007 – His Excellency Abdoulaye Diop, Minister of Finance, on behalf of the National Sanitation Agency (ONAS) formally signed a US$5.8 million grant with the World Bank’s Global Partnership on Output-Based Aid (GPOBA) to help deliver access to on-site sanitation facilities to the urban poor in Dakar, Senegal.

Nationwide, only 30 percent of households in Senegal have access to electricity. Rural electrification is even lower at 12.5 percent of households, and limited to areas around large population centers and some tertiary centers.

An output-based aid (OBA) on-site sanitation project in Senegal helped over 100,000 people access sanitation facilities in peri-urban areas of Dakar, improving the urban environment, community health, and the well-being of women and children. The project shows that well-targeted subsidies can reach a large portion of urban poor, and that investments in on-site sanitation are cost-effective.